So we’ve all got a job to do, mum, business woman, wife, daughter and all those amazingly rewarding and challenging roles!

But there’s one role, we always forget and is a major cause for burnout, stress, over-whelm, fatigue, exhaustion and anxiety!

It’s our role of Emotional Support Specialist. This is where we are labouring more than ANY OTHER JOB! We tend to work over-time A LOT, skip meals for it, run late for appointments and throw ourselves on the bed at the end of the night, dead tired.

So I’m curious, what sort of emotional labour hours are you putting in?

10 hours a week, 40 hours, 80 hours? MORE?

Well, just like any job, we’ve got to give our mind the chance to switch off. You’ve heard this before and you already know it (I can hear your mind going, yeah, Chloe, I know but problem is that I CAN’T CHANGE A THING or I CAN’T BE BOTHERED or I CAN’T LET ANYONE DOWN.

Do you know what? I TOTALLY GET IT!

We’ve all got commitments that we MUST show up for and our role of EMOTIONAL SUPPORT SPECIALIST is the MOST IMPORTANT… RIGHT?

So how do we emotionally support our children, family, friends or colleagues, when we are so emotionally drained that we’ve got nothing left in the tank?

YOU CAN’T. When your wound too tight, are stressed, exhausted and over it. You are not the Power House that you want to be for everyone else.

I was speaking to a client the other day, her biggest realisation was that she had convinced herself that putting 110% in to supporting everyone else was her calling and more important than her own health. She hated her body, her weight, her energy levels and spent more time aware of how she looked instead of what she really wanted to be doing which was being 110% present in every moment as well as powerfully and strongly showing up for her family.

What my client realised – and every woman I meet has to realise – is that we DO NOT HAVE an unlimited source of energy and emotional support to give to everyone else.

If you imagine every person like a power station, they have a limited amount of power/energy. If they hook up and share their power with another power station, their energy is halved. If they hook up and share their power with two power stations, they give away two thirds (2/3) of their energy levels. And what about if there’s three other stations needing help? I think you get the picture. Your energy levels don’t increase even if you’ve got more people to support so we need to find the small actions every day that continue to replenish and top up our emotional and energetic supplies.

Did you know 16% of woman are reporting experiencing fatigue, burn out or exhaustion most days over a three month period according to research done by the CDC. That’s shocking!

But it’s also understandable, we give away more often than we replenish. It usually takes a significant event such as an illness to kick our common sense and have us turn the perspective so we replenish ourselves before we replenish everyone else.

Here’s the way I look at it. Our people are our team so family, friends, colleagues, children form our team. There’s a lot we can learn from sports and apply in to the everyday. So I’ve played hockey forever and if there’s one thing I’ve learned from this. You need to spend more time refining your skills and your fitness so you can effectively support your team on the field (when it matters the most!). The other way, to focus on the rest of the team before yourself just doesn’t make sense. You need to know that I’ve done this before, at 15 years old, I thought to Captain was to hold the hands of everyone… I rarely worked on my own skills and fitness. As a result, I couldn’t show up for my team the way I wanted to, I was often injured and always making mistakes (not just a little, ALOT). What I learned is that you are not a role model if you spend all your time looking after everyone else because you don’t spend the time to become the person everyone needs you to be when times get tough.

Here’s the coolest thing about this. When you are in a good place and have developed the skills, then you can teach others HOW to develop their own skills, HOW to deal with experiences and how to replenish their own power instead of relying solely on you. It’s a win-win! This doesn’t mean they won’t still need you, everyone needs a leader, a role model, a mentor.

You become a role model and a leader, your team starts to role model your strength, passion and approach and develop their own Personal Power.

So where am I going with all that… being a full-time Emotional Support Specialist requires tons of energy, and we love our job! However, we need to find the time to replenish our energy so we don’t let the team down when they need it the most. Provide yourself the opportunity to be ‘A’ grade so you can role model ‘A’ grade to your team and support them to reach your level.

Chloe x

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https://sassme.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/SassMe_Logo_web.png00chloemccreedyhttps://sassme.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/SassMe_Logo_web.pngchloemccreedy2018-04-12 23:56:082018-04-12 23:56:08What's emotional labour? And are you doing too much of it?